Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

Overall seems positive, some interesting pieces:

> The only measured exploratory covariate with a significant interaction with treatment was lifetime history of SSRI use, which was associated with improved efficacy of MDMA-AT (P = 0.02; Supplementary Table 5). Covariates significantly impacting the main effect were sex assigned at birth and baseline Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)-II score; female sex assigned at birth and baseline BDI-II score ≥23 were both associated with improved outcomes irrespective of treatment assignment (P < 0.05).

This is an interesting outcome, particularly the SSRI usage

> Eight participants (MDMA-AT, n = 7; placebo with therapy, n = 1) experienced cardiac TEAEs, which included palpitations (MDMA-AT, n = 5 (9.4%); placebo with therapy, n = 1 (2.0%)) and tachycardia (MDMA-AT, n = 2 (3.8%)); all were mild.

Seems a bit concerning, but I have little to measure this against.

> superiority of MDMA-AT over SSRIs cannot be assumed without a direct comparison

I feel as though this should be done. Even though the results are promising they come with a significant safety risk for the participants who are essentially at the mercy of the administrator and could be easily subject to abuse.

That being said, for people with severe PTSD this is surely a godsend. Maybe we can mitigate the safety issue other ways.

> That being said, for people with severe PTSD this is surely a godsend.

This seems a bit of a premature statement. The long term usage affects of MDMA use can be very costly, and I suspect long term use of something that provides artificial "feel good" emotion will have a tremendous downside for people who are already struggling with normality.

> sex assigned at birth... female sex assigned at birth

As an aside - in a scientific article, this is insane language to use and really calls into question the assumptions and conclusions.

  >> sex assigned at birth... female sex assigned at birth

  > As an aside - in a scientific article, this is insane language to use and really calls into question the assumptions and conclusions.

i'm not really familiar with scientific writing, but why would that be insane language to use? what would be better?

It's not a scientific statement, it's a political statement. It doesn't matter if you agree with that political statement or not - it simply has no business being in a scientific report.

Injecting political ideology into what is supposed to be factual findings is wrong.

In scientific writing, such as studies like this - just the facts please. Anything else opens questions about motivations, conclusions, etc.

> In scientific writing, such as studies like this - just the facts please.

But those are just very precise facts? Clarifying that they refer to "female sex assigned at birth" is strictly less ambiguous than "female".

Nobody stood around and just made up a sex for a newborn soviet job-assignment style, making the language "assigned at birth" inaccurate from a scientific standpoint. From a scientific standpoint, Female and Male are clearly defined.

I will not engage any further in a political debate about this subject here. My point was political ideology statements should not be in scientific writing because they are political, the language changes with the political climate, and the language is imprecise. People reading scientific writings 100 years in the future should not have to wonder what political climate the paper was written in.

Scientific writing should not be a product of it's date and political climate.

Male and female are clearly defined (not really, but let's assume for the arguments sake). Intersex people exist, and they are impossible to identify without them telling you about it. So these people are really "assigned" a gender at birth. They might not be a huge amount of the population, but they exist. So why not use "assigned at birth"? It includes them and doesn't hurt anyone at all. I'd ask you to reconsider, whether the authors made a political statement, or whether you made this a political statement by yourself. Because I read it and not a single political thought crossed my mind...

> making the language "assigned at birth" inaccurate from a scientific standpoint

That's a strawman argument about semantics ("assign" in English does not always mean "soviet-style"), which I'm not going to bother engaging with.

> Scientific writing should not be a product of it's date and political climate.

By virtue of using language, it virtually always is. For example, the common/acceptable way of referring to ethnicities changed over time. It's virtually impossible in anything involving humans to have language (and therefore scientific language) not evolve over time.

> From a scientific standpoint, Female and Male are clearly defined.

And how do you distinguish the "scientific" female and male from the "colloquial" female and male, without leaving it ambiguous according to the "political background" of the reader? Or rather, what if, in a purely hypothetical future English, "female" and "male" refer unambiguously to the gender people identify as? It seems like you would like scientific writing to conform specifically (and only) to what you consider acceptable language _right now_, and are not actually particularly interested in accessibility to future readers.

Alupis is simply trying to help out Science in an objective and apolitical way by pointing out that some phrases can rile people up into hooting and hollering. Phrases like “assigned female at birth” can, to use an empirical term, “whip one up into a real doozy of a tizzy” that can only be quelled by posting. Anything that might trigger Poster’s Rage is definitionally Not Science because scientific words do not make people “get all flustered”

The very fact that you are this "riled up" about a plainly obvious statement such as I have made here only serves to validate my position.

Take a look at your statements and tell me you are arguing from a scientific standpoint and not one from your own personal political ideology. You cannot, in good faith, make this claim.

> It's not a scientific statement, it's a political statement.

This is a good point. Once a scientific term becomes politicized by its usage outside of clinical settings, it ceases to be scientific.

For example, weight has become politicized so when you read something like “7lb 5oz infant” in a study you can just throw the whole thing in the trash because the researcher has clearly gone Woke.

In scientific writing Mass is usually referenced instead of Weight, because weight changes depending where you are, even on the same planet (being a measurement of gravitational force).

You are making my point even stronger... and weight being political is news to me.

> Mass is usually referenced instead of Weight

You’re telling me buddy! People actually think that doctors weigh babies and write down the numbers they see on the scale when everybody really smart knows they measure infant Mass by measuring their liquid displacement and multiplying it by the density of the standardized homogenous baby slurry provided by NIST.

It’s like dang John Stewart in every delivery theater I tell you what

You are attempting to be funny and dismantle my argument by locating holes. However, unfortunately for you, these misguided political jabs only strengthen my argument.

A birth certificate is not a scientific writing. A study of the affects of MDMA on PTSD is.

> A birth certificate is not a scientific writing. A study of the affects of MDMA on PTSD is.

I’ll cheers to that! It is important that we do not include words like “assigned female at birth” in any scientific writing because

Take a breath and calm down. Triggered is supposed to be a meme, not reality.

I’m sorry seeing those Woke Words in a Science just make me so hopping mad. It’s like if they use those words and people read them, then the words will make science more or less… what I’m trying to say is they’re so bad, and nothing made of Science could make me feel this way. The only way to do anything with all this discomfort I feel from the Words when I see them online is post in the comments, it’s literally the way we’ll save society writ large

There are many social aspects to the "male" and "female" experience in society, it helps to separate those out from congenital physiology. For example, living as a woman often entails responsibilities of caregiving, housekeeping, and/or "social reproduction." Certain "emotional labors" are also relegated to women's roles, such as calendaring and keeping in touch, but none of these are safely assumed to have derived from congenital sex.

Expectations of eg emotional stoicism in men preclude eg certain platonic intimacies that are common among women. Gendered relationship norms significantly influence our mental and physical health. It would be unscientific to presume they were physiologically congenital. For that reason, it makes sense to refer to study participants by their "sex assigned at birth," rather than presuming any overlap between socialized gender and congenital sex. Remember, in scientific inquiry, precision is key.

> in a scientific article, this is insane language to use and really calls into question the assumptions and conclusions.

Springer Nature would appear to disagree with your assertion.

"Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms. Article titles and/or abstracts should indicate clearly what sex(es) the study applies to. Authors should also describe in the background, whether sex and/or gender differences may be expected; report how sex and/or gender were accounted for in the design of the study; provide disaggregated data by sex and/or gender, where appropriate; and discuss respective results. If a sex and/or gender analysis was not conducted, the rationale should be given in the Discussion. These guidelines apply to studies involving humans, vertebrate animals and cell lines."

https://www.springernature.com/gp/policies/book-publishing-p....

Your citation actually furthers my point. We are not discussing the logical notion of Gender here.

The point of these studies is that MDMA can improve the efficacy of talk therapy. I don’t think anyone in this space is thinking MDMA will replace traditional anti depressants as a thing you take regularly for an indefinite period of time.

Further, I’d speculate MDMA is not obviously harder on the body than adderall or other stimulants currently legal for ADHD.

You are aware of intersex/chromosomal conditions and “gender assignment” treatments at birth right? “Sex assigned at birth” is a well-defined empirical label.

Please don’t paint your obvious naivety re gender as scientific enlightenment. This is real populist Ben Shapiro reasoning and I’d really hope that this community is above it. The reality is that esp. when we are talking about mental health it is important to be specific about the nature of a sex/gender breakdown. Could it be a question of hormones? Socialisation? The author/s are using concise language in a scientific publication and because of your naivety and typical software developer undeserved sense of transferable expertise, you are claiming it as superfluous, when it isn’t. Please consider that maybe you are wrong, and not everyone else.

You seem to be conflating gender with sex?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com